Rod D. Martin retweeted
An incredible review of my new book “Trump’s New World Re-Order” by the inestimable @_PPatterson_.
"One has difficulty leaving it behind to go to work. [TRUMP'S NEW WORLD REORDER] IS SCINTILLATING! Written with profundity yet incorporating language that is easy to comprehend, the pages grasp the reader with the energy of a mystery novel." paigepatterson.org/post/disarming…
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD. The U.S. poverty rate just hit an all-of-history low. American households recorded their highest real median income in history.
It gets better. 975,000 new jobs were created JUST in August and September 2026, according to the latest household million more Americans working in just two months.
And we're supposed to believe Trump's economy is a disaster?
Official child poverty fell to just 13.4 percent, its lowest recorded rate. And that's before we even talk about violent crime dropping to its lowest rate since 1900: that's a BIG quality of life improvement, especially for children in inner cities.
Trump changed the incentives for investment. His tax law made immediate expensing permanent for qualifying equipment. A business can deduct the full cost when it puts that equipment to work.
That makes buying better tools more attractive. Better tools let a worker produce more in the same hour. A company that can profitably expand hires MORE people, not less, and competing employers give those people more bargaining power and higher wages.
Your boss's ability to make money has everything to do with his ability to pay you more. Treat profits as an offense and you'll quickly lose the expansion, the hiring, and the raises those profits could finance.
That's why Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" economy hit just 1.6% annual GDP growth, while Trump's is clocking in at 3.4% and rising.
And the things those workers produce are how supply catches up with demand, and how eventually, prices fall. Like they do for televisions.
If Americans need more energy, produce more energy. If they need more goods, let companies build the factories that make them. Delaying a plant doesn't abolish demand for what it would produce. It sends the order somewhere else, and the job to Mexico or China.
A family paying too much for necessities needs more supply and higher earnings. How does it help that family by making American production harder?
But Trump tackled the bottom end too. No taxes on tips. No taxes on overtime (and there's a LOT of overtime coming as the expansion accelerates). And FINALLY, no taxes on almost everyone's Social Security benefits.
Government should serve everyone, from top to bottom. Trump's does.
Democrats want to campaign against corporate profits while workers need the jobs, investment, and productivity those profits make possible. They want to talk about "affordability" after printing money for four years and closing countless refineries that produce our gas.
@larry_kudlow calls this the greatest story never told. So go tell it. People have no idea. Because the Enemedia lies nonstop. They're just an arm of the Democrats' campaign.
Tell your friends what real income means. Explain why investment matters to their paychecks. Show them that more production is how we make the things they need more affordable.
And tell them the extraordinary progress we're making. It was never going to happen all at once. You wouldn't go to the gym and immediately look shredded.
But it's happening. Now.
Tell our story. Vote. Help your friends go vote. Put them in your car and take them.
And let Trump cook.
It gets better. 975,000 new jobs were created JUST in August and September 2026, according to the latest household million more Americans working in just two months.
And we're supposed to believe Trump's economy is a disaster?
Official child poverty fell to just 13.4 percent, its lowest recorded rate. And that's before we even talk about violent crime dropping to its lowest rate since 1900: that's a BIG quality of life improvement, especially for children in inner cities.
Trump changed the incentives for investment. His tax law made immediate expensing permanent for qualifying equipment. A business can deduct the full cost when it puts that equipment to work.
That makes buying better tools more attractive. Better tools let a worker produce more in the same hour. A company that can profitably expand hires MORE people, not less, and competing employers give those people more bargaining power and higher wages.
Your boss's ability to make money has everything to do with his ability to pay you more. Treat profits as an offense and you'll quickly lose the expansion, the hiring, and the raises those profits could finance.
That's why Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" economy hit just 1.6% annual GDP growth, while Trump's is clocking in at 3.4% and rising.
And the things those workers produce are how supply catches up with demand, and how eventually, prices fall. Like they do for televisions.
If Americans need more energy, produce more energy. If they need more goods, let companies build the factories that make them. Delaying a plant doesn't abolish demand for what it would produce. It sends the order somewhere else, and the job to Mexico or China.
A family paying too much for necessities needs more supply and higher earnings. How does it help that family by making American production harder?
But Trump tackled the bottom end too. No taxes on tips. No taxes on overtime (and there's a LOT of overtime coming as the expansion accelerates). And FINALLY, no taxes on almost everyone's Social Security benefits.
Government should serve everyone, from top to bottom. Trump's does.
Democrats want to campaign against corporate profits while workers need the jobs, investment, and productivity those profits make possible. They want to talk about "affordability" after printing money for four years and closing countless refineries that produce our gas.
@larry_kudlow calls this the greatest story never told. So go tell it. People have no idea. Because the Enemedia lies nonstop. They're just an arm of the Democrats' campaign.
Tell your friends what real income means. Explain why investment matters to their paychecks. Show them that more production is how we make the things they need more affordable.
And tell them the extraordinary progress we're making. It was never going to happen all at once. You wouldn't go to the gym and immediately look shredded.
But it's happening. Now.
Tell our story. Vote. Help your friends go vote. Put them in your car and take them.
And let Trump cook.
168
2,625
4,958
82,590
@ericmetaxas Indeed.
Martin's Theory of General Election Voting and Endorsements: Seven principles for what to do when you're not happy after the primary.
This year — like every year — we are faced with imperfect candidates between whom we must choose.
I have been politically active since I was a only rarely had the chance to vote for my preferred candidate post-primary, at least at the Presidential level. Didn’t matter: the Democrat was always worse. A lot worse.
Some suggest withdrawing from the process as a viable option. Others join third parties (and it’s important to note: in all of American history, no third party has ever elected, or come close to electing, a President, although several have caused the other side to win).
I contend, and have always contended, that these are almost never good options. The advocates of these “options” say they are voting their principles in the seeming assumption that those who disagree with them don’t have any. But I have written, spoken, and lived my principles on this for decades.
In 2016, I decided that it was finally time I write them down in a comprehensive form. Donald Trump vexxed a lot of people, partly for things he’d actually done, mostly for things he hadn’t and wouldn’t. That doesn’t reduce the conscience issue at stake then, but it does make a standard essential. In a difficult situation, how do we know what to do? The same holds for some of our candidates this year, and every year, forever until Christ returns.
So here are those principles. I encourage you to think deeply about them.
Principle 1: It is almost never “the lesser of two evils,” only the better of two choices. We hear this argument ceaselessly. But it’s less Christian than humanistic. It suggests there’s an option to have candidates who aren’t fallen. That isn’t going to happen.
Some say we should apply the Bible’s standards for elders to our candidates. Generally speaking, I agree. But we have to remember that they are not actually candidates for elder, and that unlike in a church setting, someone will be elected regardless of whether they meet our preferred standards.
If we wish for godly men to be electable, we should commit ourselves to sufficient evangelism and discipleship to produce a culture in which 51% want that too.
If we won’t, we cannot help but be a minority, and the best viable candidates will look less like David and more like Darius. That’s just reality.
Principle 2: When it comes to the general election, you owe God two duties: gratitude to Him, and neighborly love for and protection of His saints. Voting is not about “rendering unto Caesar.” Caesar does not require, nor even want, us to vote. Self-government is an extraordinary blessing for which we owe deep gratitude to our God. We fling it in His face when we don’t participate.
Ask those living under dictatorships if you disagree. The alternative to involvement — the one preached by too many of our pastors — is to allow God’s enemies to rule over us, and by “us,” I don’t mean “you”: I mean your children and grandchildren and everyone you love and for whom you’re responsible. If that’s our choice, then we are going beyond the sin of the Israelites who demanded a king: we’re begging for that king to be Caligula, or Nero.
The better candidate might well not be good, just better. But the better candidate will do more good, or at least less evil. Our having a say — as Joseph, Daniel, Obadiah, Nehemiah and Mordecai each did — helps mitigate the unvarnished evil which might otherwise befall us, thus protecting the saints and, wherever possible, advancing the Kingdom, even in ungodly times.
Principle 3: Perfect is for the primary, consensus is for the general.
In the 2016 Republican primaries we had 17 choices, in my view the best field of our lifetimes up to that point. We had a robust debate. And statistically speaking, your guy probably lost.
The nomination process is a great argument, in which two broad coalitions dispute internally about what they believe matters most, and ultimately pick champions to represent their consensus position against the other side’s. Or to put that another way, primaries are about persuasion.
If you weren’t persuasive enough (and my guys were not), you have few gripes coming. Dust yourself off and start again.
In both primary and general elections, I subscribe to the famed Buckley Rule, that we should support “the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
But if my team has lost in the playoffs, someone else is winning the Super Bowl no matter how I “feel” about it.
Principle 4: We are not entitled to a “good” candidate: we have to earn one.
No one is entitled — not even us — to 51 percent. You have to earn it, just as you have to disciple your family, your church or your city with work, sweat and tears.
Some try to avoid this, longing for a multi-party system (and make no mistake, we don’t have one). But in fact, whatever its flaws, our two-party system is a great blessing.
Why? Because it’s more honest. Far more.
In multi-party systems (such as Italy’s), every party pretends to voters that it can do things it manifestly cannot, for the simple reason that no party will get even close to a majority. Afterwards, there is an election, and the most successful party (which frequently got 30 percent of the vote or less) begins cutting deals with smaller parties to form a coalition government for whom absolutely no one voted.
The coalition represents only the smoke-filled room, and the government after it will only represent some future smoke-filled room.
In America, we make our coalitions in public, with everyone’s full participation. That’s our primary. It’s better by every possible measure, even when our guys lose. And we have a better chance of persuading our countrymen next time if we don’t take our toys and go home today.
Principle 5: Yes, you are actually responsible for the likely outcome of your choices. I’m not sure why this concept is so difficult for so many of our people. If you drink and drive, you are responsible for any deaths you cause, even if you didn’t “mean” to kill anybody. If you’re a bartender and you serve too many drinks to someone who then kills somebody, you go to jail too.
So why do we not understand that standing aside and allowing a truly terrible choice to win is the same, no matter how “virtuous” your no-hope third party or write-in candidate might be? Even if you can’t stand Candidate X, there’s rarely a time you don’t need to vote against some worse Candidate Y. You must do that efficaciously or you’re voting for them in all but name.
“I’m not responsible for the outcome of my actions” is the cry of scoundrels and cowards everywhere.
Principle 6: Who will hurt us more? Beat them.
Southern Seminary professor Mark Coppenger expands on this well in his essay “Fiduciary Virtues”. He posits guardianship (“keeping safe our citizens, and hence our laws, borders, liberties, environment, strategic alliances, economy, and cultural treasures”) and stewardship (“making the most of our God-given resources, both personal and material“) as key.
Like Coppenger, I agree that the other virtues matter: I just believe these matter more in the electoral context. We are constantly told that Jimmy Carter was a “virtuous” man, in the way we use that term, but he was a terrible president, particularly by the measure of those qualities most needed in a nation’s leader.
More to the point, Carter degraded America’s defenses, enabled the Ayatollahs and the Communists (and their eradication of liberty and persecution of the church) in over 20 additional countries, trashed our economy (which is to say, our families) and placed all of us directly in harm’s way.
Was he “nicer” than Jerry Ford? I don’t know. But I also don’t care.
We could put that another way. America was right to choose to ally with Stalin against Hitler, even though Stalin was responsible for the murder of ten times as many people. Why? Because there weren’t any ICBMs in 1941, and Stalin was further away. It was not America’s duty to arbitrate eternal right and wrong: God has that quite covered.
Rather, it was America’s leaders’ duty to defeat the most immediate threat to America’s people, buying time to deal with the further threat in due course. And as it happened, God blessed that choice and wiped both evils from the Earth, the latter without the war we all feared.
Principle 7: As in all else, it’s not about you.
You may have noticed your friends fretting, in this election or some other, about “their principles,” which far too often means their preferences. They talk about irrational things, like writing in someone whose name no one knows, as a valid option to advance these.
They might as well write in Bugs Bunny, or Jed Bartlet. They need to stop kidding themselves. No one knows or cares about their personal made-up drama.
A variant on this is some people’s seeming belief that candidates are gods to whom their vote is a sacrifice, or in whom they are placing their faith. This is silly. They’re just candidates. You are not somehow cloaking them in your moral authority, certification, or blank-check approval. You’re just picking the better choice, like vegetables over popsicles (or vice versa depending on your point of view).
Our choice, however important, is more prosaic than our egos often think.
“Getting my way” is not important. “My primary candidate” is not important. Once we better understand how our system really works, once we grasp that the blessing of self-government requires our participation, once we understand that we are actually responsible for our small part in the overall outcome, all of this becomes easier.
Perhaps, as some pastors are quick to say, they are personally ready for martyrdom. But are they ready to make that choice for everyone else? For their daughters? Needlessly?
Now of course there might be special cases. Perhaps Hitler runs against Pol Pot, for example. But this is a straw man: in America, we’ve never seen such an example, nor are we likely to. And indeed, Hitler himself did not run against Pol Pot: he ran against Paul von Hindenburg. And though few of us would find Hindenburg acceptable in isolation, in 1932 he was clearly the right and better choice.
My fiduciary, protective, defensive approach may not appeal to you. Manliness does not appeal to our culture generally.
But manning up is exactly what is called for. First in the primary, where Christians tend to lollygag, only to get needlessly bested by their worldly rivals. And second in the general, wherein we tend to whine about our choices, sit on our hands, and let the worse choice lead us needlessly further from God’s truth.
I leave to you to decide whether these principles apply this time. But the exception would have to be pretty impressive.
0
0
0
334
An incredible review of my new book “Trump’s New World Re-Order” by the inestimable @_PPatterson_.
"One has difficulty leaving it behind to go to work. [TRUMP'S NEW WORLD REORDER] IS SCINTILLATING! Written with profundity yet incorporating language that is easy to comprehend, the pages grasp the reader with the energy of a mystery novel." paigepatterson.org/post/disarming…
0
2
14
2,712
Rod D. Martin retweeted
Martin's Theory of General Election Voting and Endorsements: Seven principles for what to do when you're not happy after the primary.
This year — like every year — we are faced with imperfect candidates between whom we must choose.
I have been politically active since I was a only rarely had the chance to vote for my preferred candidate post-primary, at least at the Presidential level. Didn’t matter: the Democrat was always worse. A lot worse.
Some suggest withdrawing from the process as a viable option. Others join third parties (and it’s important to note: in all of American history, no third party has ever elected, or come close to electing, a President, although several have caused the other side to win).
I contend, and have always contended, that these are almost never good options. The advocates of these “options” say they are voting their principles in the seeming assumption that those who disagree with them don’t have any. But I have written, spoken, and lived my principles on this for decades.
In 2016, I decided that it was finally time I write them down in a comprehensive form. Donald Trump vexxed a lot of people, partly for things he’d actually done, mostly for things he hadn’t and wouldn’t. That doesn’t reduce the conscience issue at stake then, but it does make a standard essential. In a difficult situation, how do we know what to do? The same holds for some of our candidates this year, and every year, forever until Christ returns.
So here are those principles. I encourage you to think deeply about them.
Principle 1: It is almost never “the lesser of two evils,” only the better of two choices. We hear this argument ceaselessly. But it’s less Christian than humanistic. It suggests there’s an option to have candidates who aren’t fallen. That isn’t going to happen.
Some say we should apply the Bible’s standards for elders to our candidates. Generally speaking, I agree. But we have to remember that they are not actually candidates for elder, and that unlike in a church setting, someone will be elected regardless of whether they meet our preferred standards.
If we wish for godly men to be electable, we should commit ourselves to sufficient evangelism and discipleship to produce a culture in which 51% want that too.
If we won’t, we cannot help but be a minority, and the best viable candidates will look less like David and more like Darius. That’s just reality.
Principle 2: When it comes to the general election, you owe God two duties: gratitude to Him, and neighborly love for and protection of His saints. Voting is not about “rendering unto Caesar.” Caesar does not require, nor even want, us to vote. Self-government is an extraordinary blessing for which we owe deep gratitude to our God. We fling it in His face when we don’t participate.
Ask those living under dictatorships if you disagree. The alternative to involvement — the one preached by too many of our pastors — is to allow God’s enemies to rule over us, and by “us,” I don’t mean “you”: I mean your children and grandchildren and everyone you love and for whom you’re responsible. If that’s our choice, then we are going beyond the sin of the Israelites who demanded a king: we’re begging for that king to be Caligula, or Nero.
The better candidate might well not be good, just better. But the better candidate will do more good, or at least less evil. Our having a say — as Joseph, Daniel, Obadiah, Nehemiah and Mordecai each did — helps mitigate the unvarnished evil which might otherwise befall us, thus protecting the saints and, wherever possible, advancing the Kingdom, even in ungodly times.
Principle 3: Perfect is for the primary, consensus is for the general.
In the 2016 Republican primaries we had 17 choices, in my view the best field of our lifetimes up to that point. We had a robust debate. And statistically speaking, your guy probably lost.
The nomination process is a great argument, in which two broad coalitions dispute internally about what they believe matters most, and ultimately pick champions to represent their consensus position against the other side’s. Or to put that another way, primaries are about persuasion.
If you weren’t persuasive enough (and my guys were not), you have few gripes coming. Dust yourself off and start again.
In both primary and general elections, I subscribe to the famed Buckley Rule, that we should support “the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
But if my team has lost in the playoffs, someone else is winning the Super Bowl no matter how I “feel” about it.
Principle 4: We are not entitled to a “good” candidate: we have to earn one.
No one is entitled — not even us — to 51 percent. You have to earn it, just as you have to disciple your family, your church or your city with work, sweat and tears.
Some try to avoid this, longing for a multi-party system (and make no mistake, we don’t have one). But in fact, whatever its flaws, our two-party system is a great blessing.
Why? Because it’s more honest. Far more.
In multi-party systems (such as Italy’s), every party pretends to voters that it can do things it manifestly cannot, for the simple reason that no party will get even close to a majority. Afterwards, there is an election, and the most successful party (which frequently got 30 percent of the vote or less) begins cutting deals with smaller parties to form a coalition government for whom absolutely no one voted.
The coalition represents only the smoke-filled room, and the government after it will only represent some future smoke-filled room.
In America, we make our coalitions in public, with everyone’s full participation. That’s our primary. It’s better by every possible measure, even when our guys lose. And we have a better chance of persuading our countrymen next time if we don’t take our toys and go home today.
Principle 5: Yes, you are actually responsible for the likely outcome of your choices. I’m not sure why this concept is so difficult for so many of our people. If you drink and drive, you are responsible for any deaths you cause, even if you didn’t “mean” to kill anybody. If you’re a bartender and you serve too many drinks to someone who then kills somebody, you go to jail too.
So why do we not understand that standing aside and allowing a truly terrible choice to win is the same, no matter how “virtuous” your no-hope third party or write-in candidate might be? Even if you can’t stand Candidate X, there’s rarely a time you don’t need to vote against some worse Candidate Y. You must do that efficaciously or you’re voting for them in all but name.
“I’m not responsible for the outcome of my actions” is the cry of scoundrels and cowards everywhere.
Principle 6: Who will hurt us more? Beat them.
Southern Seminary professor Mark Coppenger expands on this well in his essay “Fiduciary Virtues”. He posits guardianship (“keeping safe our citizens, and hence our laws, borders, liberties, environment, strategic alliances, economy, and cultural treasures”) and stewardship (“making the most of our God-given resources, both personal and material“) as key.
Like Coppenger, I agree that the other virtues matter: I just believe these matter more in the electoral context. We are constantly told that Jimmy Carter was a “virtuous” man, in the way we use that term, but he was a terrible president, particularly by the measure of those qualities most needed in a nation’s leader.
More to the point, Carter degraded America’s defenses, enabled the Ayatollahs and the Communists (and their eradication of liberty and persecution of the church) in over 20 additional countries, trashed our economy (which is to say, our families) and placed all of us directly in harm’s way.
Was he “nicer” than Jerry Ford? I don’t know. But I also don’t care.
We could put that another way. America was right to choose to ally with Stalin against Hitler, even though Stalin was responsible for the murder of ten times as many people. Why? Because there weren’t any ICBMs in 1941, and Stalin was further away. It was not America’s duty to arbitrate eternal right and wrong: God has that quite covered.
Rather, it was America’s leaders’ duty to defeat the most immediate threat to America’s people, buying time to deal with the further threat in due course. And as it happened, God blessed that choice and wiped both evils from the Earth, the latter without the war we all feared.
Principle 7: As in all else, it’s not about you.
You may have noticed your friends fretting, in this election or some other, about “their principles,” which far too often means their preferences. They talk about irrational things, like writing in someone whose name no one knows, as a valid option to advance these.
They might as well write in Bugs Bunny, or Jed Bartlet. They need to stop kidding themselves. No one knows or cares about their personal made-up drama.
A variant on this is some people’s seeming belief that candidates are gods to whom their vote is a sacrifice, or in whom they are placing their faith. This is silly. They’re just candidates. You are not somehow cloaking them in your moral authority, certification, or blank-check approval. You’re just picking the better choice, like vegetables over popsicles (or vice versa depending on your point of view).
Our choice, however important, is more prosaic than our egos often think.
“Getting my way” is not important. “My primary candidate” is not important. Once we better understand how our system really works, once we grasp that the blessing of self-government requires our participation, once we understand that we are actually responsible for our small part in the overall outcome, all of this becomes easier.
Perhaps, as some pastors are quick to say, they are personally ready for martyrdom. But are they ready to make that choice for everyone else? For their daughters? Needlessly?
Now of course there might be special cases. Perhaps Hitler runs against Pol Pot, for example. But this is a straw man: in America, we’ve never seen such an example, nor are we likely to. And indeed, Hitler himself did not run against Pol Pot: he ran against Paul von Hindenburg. And though few of us would find Hindenburg acceptable in isolation, in 1932 he was clearly the right and better choice.
My fiduciary, protective, defensive approach may not appeal to you. Manliness does not appeal to our culture generally.
But manning up is exactly what is called for. First in the primary, where Christians tend to lollygag, only to get needlessly bested by their worldly rivals. And second in the general, wherein we tend to whine about our choices, sit on our hands, and let the worse choice lead us needlessly further from God’s truth.
I leave to you to decide whether these principles apply this time. But the exception would have to be pretty impressive.
This year — like every year — we are faced with imperfect candidates between whom we must choose.
I have been politically active since I was a only rarely had the chance to vote for my preferred candidate post-primary, at least at the Presidential level. Didn’t matter: the Democrat was always worse. A lot worse.
Some suggest withdrawing from the process as a viable option. Others join third parties (and it’s important to note: in all of American history, no third party has ever elected, or come close to electing, a President, although several have caused the other side to win).
I contend, and have always contended, that these are almost never good options. The advocates of these “options” say they are voting their principles in the seeming assumption that those who disagree with them don’t have any. But I have written, spoken, and lived my principles on this for decades.
In 2016, I decided that it was finally time I write them down in a comprehensive form. Donald Trump vexxed a lot of people, partly for things he’d actually done, mostly for things he hadn’t and wouldn’t. That doesn’t reduce the conscience issue at stake then, but it does make a standard essential. In a difficult situation, how do we know what to do? The same holds for some of our candidates this year, and every year, forever until Christ returns.
So here are those principles. I encourage you to think deeply about them.
Principle 1: It is almost never “the lesser of two evils,” only the better of two choices. We hear this argument ceaselessly. But it’s less Christian than humanistic. It suggests there’s an option to have candidates who aren’t fallen. That isn’t going to happen.
Some say we should apply the Bible’s standards for elders to our candidates. Generally speaking, I agree. But we have to remember that they are not actually candidates for elder, and that unlike in a church setting, someone will be elected regardless of whether they meet our preferred standards.
If we wish for godly men to be electable, we should commit ourselves to sufficient evangelism and discipleship to produce a culture in which 51% want that too.
If we won’t, we cannot help but be a minority, and the best viable candidates will look less like David and more like Darius. That’s just reality.
Principle 2: When it comes to the general election, you owe God two duties: gratitude to Him, and neighborly love for and protection of His saints. Voting is not about “rendering unto Caesar.” Caesar does not require, nor even want, us to vote. Self-government is an extraordinary blessing for which we owe deep gratitude to our God. We fling it in His face when we don’t participate.
Ask those living under dictatorships if you disagree. The alternative to involvement — the one preached by too many of our pastors — is to allow God’s enemies to rule over us, and by “us,” I don’t mean “you”: I mean your children and grandchildren and everyone you love and for whom you’re responsible. If that’s our choice, then we are going beyond the sin of the Israelites who demanded a king: we’re begging for that king to be Caligula, or Nero.
The better candidate might well not be good, just better. But the better candidate will do more good, or at least less evil. Our having a say — as Joseph, Daniel, Obadiah, Nehemiah and Mordecai each did — helps mitigate the unvarnished evil which might otherwise befall us, thus protecting the saints and, wherever possible, advancing the Kingdom, even in ungodly times.
Principle 3: Perfect is for the primary, consensus is for the general.
In the 2016 Republican primaries we had 17 choices, in my view the best field of our lifetimes up to that point. We had a robust debate. And statistically speaking, your guy probably lost.
The nomination process is a great argument, in which two broad coalitions dispute internally about what they believe matters most, and ultimately pick champions to represent their consensus position against the other side’s. Or to put that another way, primaries are about persuasion.
If you weren’t persuasive enough (and my guys were not), you have few gripes coming. Dust yourself off and start again.
In both primary and general elections, I subscribe to the famed Buckley Rule, that we should support “the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
But if my team has lost in the playoffs, someone else is winning the Super Bowl no matter how I “feel” about it.
Principle 4: We are not entitled to a “good” candidate: we have to earn one.
No one is entitled — not even us — to 51 percent. You have to earn it, just as you have to disciple your family, your church or your city with work, sweat and tears.
Some try to avoid this, longing for a multi-party system (and make no mistake, we don’t have one). But in fact, whatever its flaws, our two-party system is a great blessing.
Why? Because it’s more honest. Far more.
In multi-party systems (such as Italy’s), every party pretends to voters that it can do things it manifestly cannot, for the simple reason that no party will get even close to a majority. Afterwards, there is an election, and the most successful party (which frequently got 30 percent of the vote or less) begins cutting deals with smaller parties to form a coalition government for whom absolutely no one voted.
The coalition represents only the smoke-filled room, and the government after it will only represent some future smoke-filled room.
In America, we make our coalitions in public, with everyone’s full participation. That’s our primary. It’s better by every possible measure, even when our guys lose. And we have a better chance of persuading our countrymen next time if we don’t take our toys and go home today.
Principle 5: Yes, you are actually responsible for the likely outcome of your choices. I’m not sure why this concept is so difficult for so many of our people. If you drink and drive, you are responsible for any deaths you cause, even if you didn’t “mean” to kill anybody. If you’re a bartender and you serve too many drinks to someone who then kills somebody, you go to jail too.
So why do we not understand that standing aside and allowing a truly terrible choice to win is the same, no matter how “virtuous” your no-hope third party or write-in candidate might be? Even if you can’t stand Candidate X, there’s rarely a time you don’t need to vote against some worse Candidate Y. You must do that efficaciously or you’re voting for them in all but name.
“I’m not responsible for the outcome of my actions” is the cry of scoundrels and cowards everywhere.
Principle 6: Who will hurt us more? Beat them.
Southern Seminary professor Mark Coppenger expands on this well in his essay “Fiduciary Virtues”. He posits guardianship (“keeping safe our citizens, and hence our laws, borders, liberties, environment, strategic alliances, economy, and cultural treasures”) and stewardship (“making the most of our God-given resources, both personal and material“) as key.
Like Coppenger, I agree that the other virtues matter: I just believe these matter more in the electoral context. We are constantly told that Jimmy Carter was a “virtuous” man, in the way we use that term, but he was a terrible president, particularly by the measure of those qualities most needed in a nation’s leader.
More to the point, Carter degraded America’s defenses, enabled the Ayatollahs and the Communists (and their eradication of liberty and persecution of the church) in over 20 additional countries, trashed our economy (which is to say, our families) and placed all of us directly in harm’s way.
Was he “nicer” than Jerry Ford? I don’t know. But I also don’t care.
We could put that another way. America was right to choose to ally with Stalin against Hitler, even though Stalin was responsible for the murder of ten times as many people. Why? Because there weren’t any ICBMs in 1941, and Stalin was further away. It was not America’s duty to arbitrate eternal right and wrong: God has that quite covered.
Rather, it was America’s leaders’ duty to defeat the most immediate threat to America’s people, buying time to deal with the further threat in due course. And as it happened, God blessed that choice and wiped both evils from the Earth, the latter without the war we all feared.
Principle 7: As in all else, it’s not about you.
You may have noticed your friends fretting, in this election or some other, about “their principles,” which far too often means their preferences. They talk about irrational things, like writing in someone whose name no one knows, as a valid option to advance these.
They might as well write in Bugs Bunny, or Jed Bartlet. They need to stop kidding themselves. No one knows or cares about their personal made-up drama.
A variant on this is some people’s seeming belief that candidates are gods to whom their vote is a sacrifice, or in whom they are placing their faith. This is silly. They’re just candidates. You are not somehow cloaking them in your moral authority, certification, or blank-check approval. You’re just picking the better choice, like vegetables over popsicles (or vice versa depending on your point of view).
Our choice, however important, is more prosaic than our egos often think.
“Getting my way” is not important. “My primary candidate” is not important. Once we better understand how our system really works, once we grasp that the blessing of self-government requires our participation, once we understand that we are actually responsible for our small part in the overall outcome, all of this becomes easier.
Perhaps, as some pastors are quick to say, they are personally ready for martyrdom. But are they ready to make that choice for everyone else? For their daughters? Needlessly?
Now of course there might be special cases. Perhaps Hitler runs against Pol Pot, for example. But this is a straw man: in America, we’ve never seen such an example, nor are we likely to. And indeed, Hitler himself did not run against Pol Pot: he ran against Paul von Hindenburg. And though few of us would find Hindenburg acceptable in isolation, in 1932 he was clearly the right and better choice.
My fiduciary, protective, defensive approach may not appeal to you. Manliness does not appeal to our culture generally.
But manning up is exactly what is called for. First in the primary, where Christians tend to lollygag, only to get needlessly bested by their worldly rivals. And second in the general, wherein we tend to whine about our choices, sit on our hands, and let the worse choice lead us needlessly further from God’s truth.
I leave to you to decide whether these principles apply this time. But the exception would have to be pretty impressive.
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
Eric is exactly right.
You'll notice that Trump's attempt to have free and fair elections is being presented by the Left as his attempt to STEAL the election. Don't buy the lie. They are desperate. A fair election will spell their demise & they know it. justthenews.com/politics-polic…
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Eric is exactly right.
You'll notice that Trump's attempt to have free and fair elections is being presented by the Left as his attempt to STEAL the election. Don't buy the lie. They are desperate. A fair election will spell their demise & they know it. justthenews.com/politics-polic…
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Take time to read this fascinating article from the great @DRJWheeler27045, architect of the Reagan Doctrine.
TRUMP SAVES SOUTH AMERICA
Every waking hour now, Trump is holding another rally in another state to save the midterms from Democrat crazies hellbent on destroying the USA. So he decides to save South America as well. Just in time. 48 hours ago all was lost. Now there is hope.
uler Lula stole the election again, like in 2022, in broad daylight like Biden’s minions in 2020. Every world leader knew it, and knew the 80 year-old communist thug would go on a vindictive rampage to ruin the lives of the millions who voted against him. Yet one after the other, they cowardly rushed to publicly congratulate him on the theft he called victory.
EU Commissioner Ursula Von Der Leyen purred "Democracy and multilateralism have won in Brazil.” India’s Modi, France’s Macron, Italy’s Meloni, Germany’s Merz all chimed in. Of course, all the Dem leftards like AOC, Bernie, Ro Khanna et al did as well.
We’ve all been hearing about how Trump by abolishing the centi-billion dollar Dem slush fund, USAID, financing lefty-commie governments, enabled right-wing parties to turn almost all of South America red. And surprise, every single one groveled at Lula’s feet: Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz, Chile’s Juan Kast, Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Panama’s Jose Mulino, Paraguay’s Santiago Pena, Peru’s Keiko Fujimori, plus Venezuela's unelected Maduro VP Delcy Rodriguez.
Notice who’s missing? Yep, the one South American leader with cojones, Argentina’s Javier Milei. When Lula’s henchman on the Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes, ordered Flavio’s passport seized on Monday (10/26, the day after Sunday’s election), Milei got a message to Flavio that he’d get him out. By Tuesday he got the OK from Marco Rubio who got it from Trump. By 11pm last night, using his Italian passport, Flavio with his wife and two daughters crossed the Tancredo Neves International Bridge from Brazil into Argentina where Milei’s people were waiting for him.
The bridge is across the Iguazu River adjacent to the famous Iguazu Falls, one of the world’s great natural wonders. The photo you see is just a small portion of the Falls (that’s my son Jackson at age 10 back in 2002).
The Bolsonaros were quickly taken to the nearby Puerto Iguazu Airport to board a private Gulfstream G4 operated by Baires Fly, an Argentinian charter company. Wheels up a little after midnight, an early morning fuel stop at Guayaquil, Ecuador, and by 9:30am EDT this morning, landing at Opa-locka Executive Airport near Miami, safe and sound in America.
You have no idea what this rescue has meant to tens of millions of Brazilians. To have their hopes of freedom at last from Lula’s tyranny dashed by the brazen theft of the presidency at the very last moment, then spit upon by all the world’s leaders by not saying a whisper about the theft, just dove-cooing over Lula, left them with an existential bitterness and dejection.
Then within hours, they see the President of the United States tell reporters on Monday that Lula’s was “just another rigged election.” The next day they hear that Milei got Flavio and his family out of Brazil. Then today they learn that they are safe in the US thanks to President Trump, Marco Rubio, and Javier Milei. These three are now heroes to those tens of millions of Brazilians. They now have hope again.
Further, this reverberates throughout the entire continent. All those groveling South America leaders now realize they had a failure of nerve in endorsing Lula. Knowing that Trump and Rubio have their six, you’ll see an increasing confidence in their standing up to Lula, and not standing for any of his bullying.
This saga is only in its first stages. There’s no way of knowing how it will end. But for the moment, Donald Trump has saved Brazil and all South America. And very large numbers of people in both know it. (Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
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Martin's Theory of General Election Voting and Endorsements: Seven principles for what to do when you're not happy after the primary.
This year — like every year — we are faced with imperfect candidates between whom we must choose.
I have been politically active since I was a only rarely had the chance to vote for my preferred candidate post-primary, at least at the Presidential level. Didn’t matter: the Democrat was always worse. A lot worse.
Some suggest withdrawing from the process as a viable option. Others join third parties (and it’s important to note: in all of American history, no third party has ever elected, or come close to electing, a President, although several have caused the other side to win).
I contend, and have always contended, that these are almost never good options. The advocates of these “options” say they are voting their principles in the seeming assumption that those who disagree with them don’t have any. But I have written, spoken, and lived my principles on this for decades.
In 2016, I decided that it was finally time I write them down in a comprehensive form. Donald Trump vexxed a lot of people, partly for things he’d actually done, mostly for things he hadn’t and wouldn’t. That doesn’t reduce the conscience issue at stake then, but it does make a standard essential. In a difficult situation, how do we know what to do? The same holds for some of our candidates this year, and every year, forever until Christ returns.
So here are those principles. I encourage you to think deeply about them.
Principle 1: It is almost never “the lesser of two evils,” only the better of two choices. We hear this argument ceaselessly. But it’s less Christian than humanistic. It suggests there’s an option to have candidates who aren’t fallen. That isn’t going to happen.
Some say we should apply the Bible’s standards for elders to our candidates. Generally speaking, I agree. But we have to remember that they are not actually candidates for elder, and that unlike in a church setting, someone will be elected regardless of whether they meet our preferred standards.
If we wish for godly men to be electable, we should commit ourselves to sufficient evangelism and discipleship to produce a culture in which 51% want that too.
If we won’t, we cannot help but be a minority, and the best viable candidates will look less like David and more like Darius. That’s just reality.
Principle 2: When it comes to the general election, you owe God two duties: gratitude to Him, and neighborly love for and protection of His saints. Voting is not about “rendering unto Caesar.” Caesar does not require, nor even want, us to vote. Self-government is an extraordinary blessing for which we owe deep gratitude to our God. We fling it in His face when we don’t participate.
Ask those living under dictatorships if you disagree. The alternative to involvement — the one preached by too many of our pastors — is to allow God’s enemies to rule over us, and by “us,” I don’t mean “you”: I mean your children and grandchildren and everyone you love and for whom you’re responsible. If that’s our choice, then we are going beyond the sin of the Israelites who demanded a king: we’re begging for that king to be Caligula, or Nero.
The better candidate might well not be good, just better. But the better candidate will do more good, or at least less evil. Our having a say — as Joseph, Daniel, Obadiah, Nehemiah and Mordecai each did — helps mitigate the unvarnished evil which might otherwise befall us, thus protecting the saints and, wherever possible, advancing the Kingdom, even in ungodly times.
Principle 3: Perfect is for the primary, consensus is for the general.
In the 2016 Republican primaries we had 17 choices, in my view the best field of our lifetimes up to that point. We had a robust debate. And statistically speaking, your guy probably lost.
The nomination process is a great argument, in which two broad coalitions dispute internally about what they believe matters most, and ultimately pick champions to represent their consensus position against the other side’s. Or to put that another way, primaries are about persuasion.
If you weren’t persuasive enough (and my guys were not), you have few gripes coming. Dust yourself off and start again.
In both primary and general elections, I subscribe to the famed Buckley Rule, that we should support “the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
But if my team has lost in the playoffs, someone else is winning the Super Bowl no matter how I “feel” about it.
Principle 4: We are not entitled to a “good” candidate: we have to earn one.
No one is entitled — not even us — to 51 percent. You have to earn it, just as you have to disciple your family, your church or your city with work, sweat and tears.
Some try to avoid this, longing for a multi-party system (and make no mistake, we don’t have one). But in fact, whatever its flaws, our two-party system is a great blessing.
Why? Because it’s more honest. Far more.
In multi-party systems (such as Italy’s), every party pretends to voters that it can do things it manifestly cannot, for the simple reason that no party will get even close to a majority. Afterwards, there is an election, and the most successful party (which frequently got 30 percent of the vote or less) begins cutting deals with smaller parties to form a coalition government for whom absolutely no one voted.
The coalition represents only the smoke-filled room, and the government after it will only represent some future smoke-filled room.
In America, we make our coalitions in public, with everyone’s full participation. That’s our primary. It’s better by every possible measure, even when our guys lose. And we have a better chance of persuading our countrymen next time if we don’t take our toys and go home today.
Principle 5: Yes, you are actually responsible for the likely outcome of your choices. I’m not sure why this concept is so difficult for so many of our people. If you drink and drive, you are responsible for any deaths you cause, even if you didn’t “mean” to kill anybody. If you’re a bartender and you serve too many drinks to someone who then kills somebody, you go to jail too.
So why do we not understand that standing aside and allowing a truly terrible choice to win is the same, no matter how “virtuous” your no-hope third party or write-in candidate might be? Even if you can’t stand Candidate X, there’s rarely a time you don’t need to vote against some worse Candidate Y. You must do that efficaciously or you’re voting for them in all but name.
“I’m not responsible for the outcome of my actions” is the cry of scoundrels and cowards everywhere.
Principle 6: Who will hurt us more? Beat them.
Southern Seminary professor Mark Coppenger expands on this well in his essay “Fiduciary Virtues”. He posits guardianship (“keeping safe our citizens, and hence our laws, borders, liberties, environment, strategic alliances, economy, and cultural treasures”) and stewardship (“making the most of our God-given resources, both personal and material“) as key.
Like Coppenger, I agree that the other virtues matter: I just believe these matter more in the electoral context. We are constantly told that Jimmy Carter was a “virtuous” man, in the way we use that term, but he was a terrible president, particularly by the measure of those qualities most needed in a nation’s leader.
More to the point, Carter degraded America’s defenses, enabled the Ayatollahs and the Communists (and their eradication of liberty and persecution of the church) in over 20 additional countries, trashed our economy (which is to say, our families) and placed all of us directly in harm’s way.
Was he “nicer” than Jerry Ford? I don’t know. But I also don’t care.
We could put that another way. America was right to choose to ally with Stalin against Hitler, even though Stalin was responsible for the murder of ten times as many people. Why? Because there weren’t any ICBMs in 1941, and Stalin was further away. It was not America’s duty to arbitrate eternal right and wrong: God has that quite covered.
Rather, it was America’s leaders’ duty to defeat the most immediate threat to America’s people, buying time to deal with the further threat in due course. And as it happened, God blessed that choice and wiped both evils from the Earth, the latter without the war we all feared.
Principle 7: As in all else, it’s not about you.
You may have noticed your friends fretting, in this election or some other, about “their principles,” which far too often means their preferences. They talk about irrational things, like writing in someone whose name no one knows, as a valid option to advance these.
They might as well write in Bugs Bunny, or Jed Bartlet. They need to stop kidding themselves. No one knows or cares about their personal made-up drama.
A variant on this is some people’s seeming belief that candidates are gods to whom their vote is a sacrifice, or in whom they are placing their faith. This is silly. They’re just candidates. You are not somehow cloaking them in your moral authority, certification, or blank-check approval. You’re just picking the better choice, like vegetables over popsicles (or vice versa depending on your point of view).
Our choice, however important, is more prosaic than our egos often think.
“Getting my way” is not important. “My primary candidate” is not important. Once we better understand how our system really works, once we grasp that the blessing of self-government requires our participation, once we understand that we are actually responsible for our small part in the overall outcome, all of this becomes easier.
Perhaps, as some pastors are quick to say, they are personally ready for martyrdom. But are they ready to make that choice for everyone else? For their daughters? Needlessly?
Now of course there might be special cases. Perhaps Hitler runs against Pol Pot, for example. But this is a straw man: in America, we’ve never seen such an example, nor are we likely to. And indeed, Hitler himself did not run against Pol Pot: he ran against Paul von Hindenburg. And though few of us would find Hindenburg acceptable in isolation, in 1932 he was clearly the right and better choice.
My fiduciary, protective, defensive approach may not appeal to you. Manliness does not appeal to our culture generally.
But manning up is exactly what is called for. First in the primary, where Christians tend to lollygag, only to get needlessly bested by their worldly rivals. And second in the general, wherein we tend to whine about our choices, sit on our hands, and let the worse choice lead us needlessly further from God’s truth.
I leave to you to decide whether these principles apply this time. But the exception would have to be pretty impressive.
This year — like every year — we are faced with imperfect candidates between whom we must choose.
I have been politically active since I was a only rarely had the chance to vote for my preferred candidate post-primary, at least at the Presidential level. Didn’t matter: the Democrat was always worse. A lot worse.
Some suggest withdrawing from the process as a viable option. Others join third parties (and it’s important to note: in all of American history, no third party has ever elected, or come close to electing, a President, although several have caused the other side to win).
I contend, and have always contended, that these are almost never good options. The advocates of these “options” say they are voting their principles in the seeming assumption that those who disagree with them don’t have any. But I have written, spoken, and lived my principles on this for decades.
In 2016, I decided that it was finally time I write them down in a comprehensive form. Donald Trump vexxed a lot of people, partly for things he’d actually done, mostly for things he hadn’t and wouldn’t. That doesn’t reduce the conscience issue at stake then, but it does make a standard essential. In a difficult situation, how do we know what to do? The same holds for some of our candidates this year, and every year, forever until Christ returns.
So here are those principles. I encourage you to think deeply about them.
Principle 1: It is almost never “the lesser of two evils,” only the better of two choices. We hear this argument ceaselessly. But it’s less Christian than humanistic. It suggests there’s an option to have candidates who aren’t fallen. That isn’t going to happen.
Some say we should apply the Bible’s standards for elders to our candidates. Generally speaking, I agree. But we have to remember that they are not actually candidates for elder, and that unlike in a church setting, someone will be elected regardless of whether they meet our preferred standards.
If we wish for godly men to be electable, we should commit ourselves to sufficient evangelism and discipleship to produce a culture in which 51% want that too.
If we won’t, we cannot help but be a minority, and the best viable candidates will look less like David and more like Darius. That’s just reality.
Principle 2: When it comes to the general election, you owe God two duties: gratitude to Him, and neighborly love for and protection of His saints. Voting is not about “rendering unto Caesar.” Caesar does not require, nor even want, us to vote. Self-government is an extraordinary blessing for which we owe deep gratitude to our God. We fling it in His face when we don’t participate.
Ask those living under dictatorships if you disagree. The alternative to involvement — the one preached by too many of our pastors — is to allow God’s enemies to rule over us, and by “us,” I don’t mean “you”: I mean your children and grandchildren and everyone you love and for whom you’re responsible. If that’s our choice, then we are going beyond the sin of the Israelites who demanded a king: we’re begging for that king to be Caligula, or Nero.
The better candidate might well not be good, just better. But the better candidate will do more good, or at least less evil. Our having a say — as Joseph, Daniel, Obadiah, Nehemiah and Mordecai each did — helps mitigate the unvarnished evil which might otherwise befall us, thus protecting the saints and, wherever possible, advancing the Kingdom, even in ungodly times.
Principle 3: Perfect is for the primary, consensus is for the general.
In the 2016 Republican primaries we had 17 choices, in my view the best field of our lifetimes up to that point. We had a robust debate. And statistically speaking, your guy probably lost.
The nomination process is a great argument, in which two broad coalitions dispute internally about what they believe matters most, and ultimately pick champions to represent their consensus position against the other side’s. Or to put that another way, primaries are about persuasion.
If you weren’t persuasive enough (and my guys were not), you have few gripes coming. Dust yourself off and start again.
In both primary and general elections, I subscribe to the famed Buckley Rule, that we should support “the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
But if my team has lost in the playoffs, someone else is winning the Super Bowl no matter how I “feel” about it.
Principle 4: We are not entitled to a “good” candidate: we have to earn one.
No one is entitled — not even us — to 51 percent. You have to earn it, just as you have to disciple your family, your church or your city with work, sweat and tears.
Some try to avoid this, longing for a multi-party system (and make no mistake, we don’t have one). But in fact, whatever its flaws, our two-party system is a great blessing.
Why? Because it’s more honest. Far more.
In multi-party systems (such as Italy’s), every party pretends to voters that it can do things it manifestly cannot, for the simple reason that no party will get even close to a majority. Afterwards, there is an election, and the most successful party (which frequently got 30 percent of the vote or less) begins cutting deals with smaller parties to form a coalition government for whom absolutely no one voted.
The coalition represents only the smoke-filled room, and the government after it will only represent some future smoke-filled room.
In America, we make our coalitions in public, with everyone’s full participation. That’s our primary. It’s better by every possible measure, even when our guys lose. And we have a better chance of persuading our countrymen next time if we don’t take our toys and go home today.
Principle 5: Yes, you are actually responsible for the likely outcome of your choices. I’m not sure why this concept is so difficult for so many of our people. If you drink and drive, you are responsible for any deaths you cause, even if you didn’t “mean” to kill anybody. If you’re a bartender and you serve too many drinks to someone who then kills somebody, you go to jail too.
So why do we not understand that standing aside and allowing a truly terrible choice to win is the same, no matter how “virtuous” your no-hope third party or write-in candidate might be? Even if you can’t stand Candidate X, there’s rarely a time you don’t need to vote against some worse Candidate Y. You must do that efficaciously or you’re voting for them in all but name.
“I’m not responsible for the outcome of my actions” is the cry of scoundrels and cowards everywhere.
Principle 6: Who will hurt us more? Beat them.
Southern Seminary professor Mark Coppenger expands on this well in his essay “Fiduciary Virtues”. He posits guardianship (“keeping safe our citizens, and hence our laws, borders, liberties, environment, strategic alliances, economy, and cultural treasures”) and stewardship (“making the most of our God-given resources, both personal and material“) as key.
Like Coppenger, I agree that the other virtues matter: I just believe these matter more in the electoral context. We are constantly told that Jimmy Carter was a “virtuous” man, in the way we use that term, but he was a terrible president, particularly by the measure of those qualities most needed in a nation’s leader.
More to the point, Carter degraded America’s defenses, enabled the Ayatollahs and the Communists (and their eradication of liberty and persecution of the church) in over 20 additional countries, trashed our economy (which is to say, our families) and placed all of us directly in harm’s way.
Was he “nicer” than Jerry Ford? I don’t know. But I also don’t care.
We could put that another way. America was right to choose to ally with Stalin against Hitler, even though Stalin was responsible for the murder of ten times as many people. Why? Because there weren’t any ICBMs in 1941, and Stalin was further away. It was not America’s duty to arbitrate eternal right and wrong: God has that quite covered.
Rather, it was America’s leaders’ duty to defeat the most immediate threat to America’s people, buying time to deal with the further threat in due course. And as it happened, God blessed that choice and wiped both evils from the Earth, the latter without the war we all feared.
Principle 7: As in all else, it’s not about you.
You may have noticed your friends fretting, in this election or some other, about “their principles,” which far too often means their preferences. They talk about irrational things, like writing in someone whose name no one knows, as a valid option to advance these.
They might as well write in Bugs Bunny, or Jed Bartlet. They need to stop kidding themselves. No one knows or cares about their personal made-up drama.
A variant on this is some people’s seeming belief that candidates are gods to whom their vote is a sacrifice, or in whom they are placing their faith. This is silly. They’re just candidates. You are not somehow cloaking them in your moral authority, certification, or blank-check approval. You’re just picking the better choice, like vegetables over popsicles (or vice versa depending on your point of view).
Our choice, however important, is more prosaic than our egos often think.
“Getting my way” is not important. “My primary candidate” is not important. Once we better understand how our system really works, once we grasp that the blessing of self-government requires our participation, once we understand that we are actually responsible for our small part in the overall outcome, all of this becomes easier.
Perhaps, as some pastors are quick to say, they are personally ready for martyrdom. But are they ready to make that choice for everyone else? For their daughters? Needlessly?
Now of course there might be special cases. Perhaps Hitler runs against Pol Pot, for example. But this is a straw man: in America, we’ve never seen such an example, nor are we likely to. And indeed, Hitler himself did not run against Pol Pot: he ran against Paul von Hindenburg. And though few of us would find Hindenburg acceptable in isolation, in 1932 he was clearly the right and better choice.
My fiduciary, protective, defensive approach may not appeal to you. Manliness does not appeal to our culture generally.
But manning up is exactly what is called for. First in the primary, where Christians tend to lollygag, only to get needlessly bested by their worldly rivals. And second in the general, wherein we tend to whine about our choices, sit on our hands, and let the worse choice lead us needlessly further from God’s truth.
I leave to you to decide whether these principles apply this time. But the exception would have to be pretty impressive.
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
Lula's former defense lawyer extended Brazil's voting deadline on election day. Not for the whole country. Just for precincts that favored Lula. Everyone else got the normal cutoff.
Lula won. Now he wants greater control over social media.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Jair mer conservative president, received a prison sentence of 27 years and three months, basically for opposing Lula. His son Flávio ran against Lula this year, won the first round, and challenged the result of Sunday's runoff.
So Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin -- Lula's former defense lawyer -- rigged the game. Lula's supporters got an extended opportunity to vote. No one else.
Sounds pretty 3am ballot-y to me.
And it gets worse. Immediately after the rigged election was called in Lula's favor, Flávio Bolsonaro's passport was cancelled. Lula intended to throw him in prison like his father, pretty much for having run against him.
Then, if that weren't bad enough, Lula used his victory speech to announce that social media platforms must be censored.
Alex Soros and other Democrats celebrated all this. Apparently, putting the opposition's former president behind bars and promising more control over political communication are how the Left defends "Our Democracy" now.
But that's not "democracy". That's communism. If a Democrat tells you they're "defending democracy", they mean they're defending rule by Democrats. And you better not get in their way.
Brazil demonstrates that you can have "elections" all you want and still lose the ability to change the outcome. A ruling faction can preserve the ceremony while using courts and censorship to make replacing it harder with every election.
Let a government punish peaceful opposition, and even helping your neighbors replace it becomes a risk. Ask attorneys like John Eastman, disbarred by the overwhelmingly Democrat California Bar simply because he represented Donald Trump.
They don't see you as a citizen. They see you as a subject, and one they barely tolerate.
And yet some Republicans want to sit out the midterms because they're upset about gas prices? How short-sighted and stupid can you get? You're not going to have to worry about gas prices in prison, or even after Democrats fulfill their promise to ban internal combustion engines. And what do you think that will do to prices?
Don't be a moron. Your disappointment won't restrain the Democrats who take power in your absence. It won't protect your speech, your business, or your children. It will give people who despise your convictions more authority over all three.
Vote. Tell your friends what's at stake. Make the calls. Drive people to the polls.
The Left can count on its committed supporters. It also counts on conservatives who decide that withholding their vote will teach Republicans a lesson.
Any Democrat who won't condemn what just happened in Brazil is a totalitarian, and you will find their jackboot on your throat if you let them take power.
Brazil is a warning. Take it seriously while you still can.
Lula won. Now he wants greater control over social media.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Jair mer conservative president, received a prison sentence of 27 years and three months, basically for opposing Lula. His son Flávio ran against Lula this year, won the first round, and challenged the result of Sunday's runoff.
So Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin -- Lula's former defense lawyer -- rigged the game. Lula's supporters got an extended opportunity to vote. No one else.
Sounds pretty 3am ballot-y to me.
And it gets worse. Immediately after the rigged election was called in Lula's favor, Flávio Bolsonaro's passport was cancelled. Lula intended to throw him in prison like his father, pretty much for having run against him.
Then, if that weren't bad enough, Lula used his victory speech to announce that social media platforms must be censored.
Alex Soros and other Democrats celebrated all this. Apparently, putting the opposition's former president behind bars and promising more control over political communication are how the Left defends "Our Democracy" now.
But that's not "democracy". That's communism. If a Democrat tells you they're "defending democracy", they mean they're defending rule by Democrats. And you better not get in their way.
Brazil demonstrates that you can have "elections" all you want and still lose the ability to change the outcome. A ruling faction can preserve the ceremony while using courts and censorship to make replacing it harder with every election.
Let a government punish peaceful opposition, and even helping your neighbors replace it becomes a risk. Ask attorneys like John Eastman, disbarred by the overwhelmingly Democrat California Bar simply because he represented Donald Trump.
They don't see you as a citizen. They see you as a subject, and one they barely tolerate.
And yet some Republicans want to sit out the midterms because they're upset about gas prices? How short-sighted and stupid can you get? You're not going to have to worry about gas prices in prison, or even after Democrats fulfill their promise to ban internal combustion engines. And what do you think that will do to prices?
Don't be a moron. Your disappointment won't restrain the Democrats who take power in your absence. It won't protect your speech, your business, or your children. It will give people who despise your convictions more authority over all three.
Vote. Tell your friends what's at stake. Make the calls. Drive people to the polls.
The Left can count on its committed supporters. It also counts on conservatives who decide that withholding their vote will teach Republicans a lesson.
Any Democrat who won't condemn what just happened in Brazil is a totalitarian, and you will find their jackboot on your throat if you let them take power.
Brazil is a warning. Take it seriously while you still can.
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@aimeetaylor240 @iranidaturan Are you trying to deafen us with all the screeching? 🤣
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